466 – District 9

Producer Peter Jackson’s tale about extraterrestrial refugees stuck living in a slum in Johannesburg, South Africa is an inventive, chilling, and thoughtful look at race relations. Or maybe it’s just an exciting bit of sci-fi that turns the old invaders-from-space cliche on its ear. Can’t it be both?

The aliens have been living in District 9 for 28 years, and things have gotten bad for them. Crime is way, way up, and everyone lives in abject poverty. The downward spiral is so devastating, in fact, that the government has decided to forcibly move all of the aliens (over a million of them) to a new set of camps, ostensibly safer, cleaner living quarters. But the man designated as the chief evictor, Wikus Van de Merwe (Sharlto Copely), is inadvertently exposed to the aliens’ biochemistry – and he begins to turn into one of them!

Intelligently shot in a pseudodocumentary style, the movie opens with an interview with the workmanlike, nepotistic Wikus, a man who happily goes about his job of telling aliens (all of whom understand English and Afrikaans), despite little training in dealing with the new species and little regard for diplomacy or his own safety. Wikus thinks he’s stumbled upon the find of a lifetime when, while evicting an alien and his son, he finds a capsule filled with a viscous black fluid; when it sprays into his face, his DNA begins to transform him into a sort of half-man, half-alien hybrid.

But lest you think this is just about Wikus turning into an alien and then being pursued and persecuted by the government, rest assured there are a lot of explosions, and killer robots, and weapons of mass distruction. It’s sort of like watching the 1983 miniseries V combined with the video game Doom, really. For half of the movie, you’re suspicious of the aliens (who are analgous to the black population in SA, at least during the apartheid era), but you’re also distrustful of Wikus, who seems like a naive idiot bureaucrat who has no real idea of the danger he’s in or of the consequences of his actions.

I think that what really makes this work is the cinematic style of on-the-ground, cinema verite action. When Wikus is running from shanty to lean-to, being shot at by a plethora of pistol packing contractors, you can almost feel the heat pulsating off his mutating body. Wikus is desperate, but not heroic or saintly; that is to say, he doesn’t have this sudden epiphany about how horrible the aliens have been treated. After all, he’s just another dim-witted pencil pusher who happens to be the son-in-law of the CEO of the contractors hired to move the aliens. So I guess what I’m saying is that he’s just the sort of guy you wouldn’t like at all under normal circumstances. Which these clearly are not.

The viral marketing of District 9 led to a lot of chatter (and hype) about the movie, but thankfully this is not another Cloverfield; that is, it’s pretty damn good. Very good, in fact, with an excellent, not overly optimistic ending, believable characters (both alien and human), crisply plotted action, and lots of explody things. And again, the realistic approach to telling the story makes you feel as if you’re watching the whole thing spool out on a low-rent version of CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, only Anderson Cooper is a dorky white guy. In other words, exactly the same.

Top marks for this cunning, compelling firestorm of daring rescues, anguished parenting, and against-all-odds derring-do. Most sci-fi thrillers take the easy way out of having their people run screaming from scene to scene, pursued by evil robots wielding machetes, with there are no hidden layers and just a constant onslaught of aural assaults. District 9 eschews those trappings for a more bare-bones, gritty film.

District 9: ***

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